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Federal and state laws allow state party committees to transfer money between their federal and state accounts – using the national party committee as an intermediary – rendering the state contractor ban meaningless at the party level.

State contractors cannot donate to certain candidates or to state political parties. However, state parties have federal accounts to support presidential and congressional campaigns.

Under federal rules, state parties can transfer money from their federal accounts to the national party committees.

Under state law, a national party committee is explicitly allowed to transfer money from the equivalent of its federal account to the state party’s state account.

In other words, state contractors can give money to a state party’s federal account. That money can be transferred to the national party committee and then back to the state party’s state account.

A law passed last year allows state parties to spend unlimited funds in support of candidates. This means that a state contractor’s donation can flow from the federal account to a national party committee back to the state party and on to benefit an individual candidate.

The Connecticut Democratic Party has been accepting state contractor contributions to its federal account on the basis of a 2007 opinion of counsel provided by staff at the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

“The person requesting the opinion of counsel may rely upon the opinion with respect to any matter brought before the Commission based upon the same facts and circumstances addressed in the opinion of counsel,” according to a SEEC guide.

An opinion of counsel is not as powerful as advisory opinion. When the commission issues advisory opinions, anyone can rely on the advice not just the entity that requested it.

SEEC considers three different organizations to be national committees: each national party committee, each party’s Congressional campaign committee and each campaign committee for the U.S. Senate.

Gov. Dannel Malloy cancelled plans to provide $300,000 in borrowed state money to a New Haven nonprofit with links to the Communist Party USA after military veterans shared their opposition.

Previously, members of the Malloy administration had made comments supportive of the funding for the New Haven People’s Center, including senior advisor Roy Occhiogrosso and Office of Policy and Management Secretary Ben Barnes.

The center is run by officials in the Connecticut chapter of the Communist Party USA and hosts the Connecticut bureau of People’s World, the party newspaper.

“I am particularly concerned about the opposition of veterans groups and want to take that into consideration,” Malloy said Monday at a meeting of the State Bond Commission when he announced the funding would not be considered. “So therefore I decided that we should not go forward with this project.”

“There are some important activities that occur at this building,” Malloy said. “I don’t deny that. But at this time they should find other ways to support this project.”

The administration received its first warning about the project from a retired state employee who previously oversaw grant funding from the Department of Social Services.

If Malloy allowed the commission to approve the funding, it would have come from DSS.

Veterans hospitals deserve government money more than Communists do, declared Mike Rogalsky, who served in an Army hospital evacuation unit in Vung Tao, Vietnam, in 1968. He called Malloy’s support for the People’s Center a “total disrespect to any and all veterans who have fought” Communism.

Another Vietnam vet, former Marine Rick DePinto…occupied the People’s Center’s steps with his buddies from Waterbury’s Rat Pack while the formal speeches took place on the sidewalk. Afterward he offered a more succinct take on the $300,000 bonding request: “It sucks.”

“I saw the opposition of veterans. I ran into some veterans last weekend as well as reading coverage of their opposition,” Malloy said after the commission meeting. “This clearly has become an emotional issue.”

“I’m concerned about the amount of controversy that this has caused particularly for them, with respect to those individuals who have served this nation in the armed services,” he explained.

Malloy said the People’s Center is a “viable” and “legally constituted” nonprofit, but “because of the amount of opposition and hurt that this has engendered, I thought it was appropriate to move on.”

He said the controversy stemmed from the “fully legal ties of some of the individuals to the Communist party.”

“But ultimately what that represents to people who served in various conflicts, you know, became a concern,” Malloy said.

Sen. Len Suzio, R-Meriden, who spoke at the demonstration, congratulated veterans Monday on their ability to change policy.

“To the scores of taxpayers – especially the many veterans groups – who spoke out against this bond item: Congratulations,” Suzio said in a statement. “Your voices were heard.”

Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., and founder of StudentsFirst, speaks on the steps of the Capitol in Hartford, Connecticut. The event was hosted by the Connecticut Parents Union.

Zachary Janowski, investigative reporter for the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, addresses the Connecticut Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society on January 18, 2012. Dr. Roger Pilon, a Cato Institute Scholar, spoke earlier in the morning about whether the individual mandate will hold up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

“If there were, God forbid, some accident at this hotel, the Republican Party and the conservative movement in Connecticut would be decimated for decades to come,” The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol told a crowd of more than 200 at a Nov. 4 Yankee Institute luncheon. “So let’s hope everything is stable for the next hour.”

“I’m familiar with being a conservative in New England,” said Kristol who grew up in New York, attended Harvard and later taught there.

“I was the token conservative on the faculty. They like to have one at all times. It’s useful so the kids know what a conservative looks like,” Kristol said. “Especially when they get out and have to have job interviews.”

“I know politics here is frustrating,” Kristol said. “Believe me, it could be worse. You could be in Massachusetts.”

After leaving Harvard to work in government, Kristol went on to start The Weekly Standard, which he still edits.

“Tip O’Neill was our Congressman,” he said, recalling his time teaching at Harvard. “He was Speaker of the House, a revered figure, obviously, in Boston.”

Kristol said in 1984 he voted for Reagan and Ray Shamie, who ran against John Kerry in his first campaign for U.S. Senate. He said he also voted against O’Neil.

“Just out of curiosity, how many votes did the Republican running against Tip O’Neill get,” Kristol recalled asking his wife.

“I hate to tell you this, there was no Republican running against Tip O’Neill.”

“I know I voted for someone,” he said. “It turned out I had voted for the Communist.”

Kristol said in 1996 he told his story about voting for a communist at a debate at Jewish Theological Seminary. He said he didn’t get much laughter and one member of the audience said it would be a tough choice between O’Neill and a communist.

After the debate another audience member introduced himself: “I’ve changed a lot in the last 12 years, but actually I’m the Communist you voted for.”

History of conservatism

Kristol said the history of American conservatism can be divided into three phases, with the first beginning in 1955 with the founding of National Review. He said conservatism in the first phase was opposition: “Opposition to big government liberalism, opposition to liberalism when it was soft on communism, opposition to various progressive projects.”

“The first quarter-century of conservatism is in opposition. I think it’s a very impressive period incidentally when you look at how united the forces were against Bill Buckley in 1955 or really even against my father and Norm Podhoretz and the neoconservatives around 1970. How the culture and the academy, the political establishment was just so dismissive of the notion that you could actually have a governing conservatism in America. That you could move back towards a respect for free markets, that you could actually defeat the Evil Empire, that it wasn’t crazy to make the case for some traditional values and social structures. That things like welfare shouldn’t just go forever. That it should be reformed. Lower tax rates. One forgets just how unpopular those positions were.”

Kristol said the 1970s were a watershed moment for the movement.

“Conservatives made their case. They were helped a lot by reality, which made the case against liberalism, especially in the person of Jimmy Carter. It helped a lot to have Ronald Reagan as a leader, who was able to convince the American public that conservatism wasn’t some crazy, you know, eccentric movement.”

“To me the big story of those 25, 28 years let’s call it, to 2008, is that a lot of those ideas worked,” he said. “We’re so involved in the war of ideas that sometimes we forget that reality is the test.”

Kristol said many serious people thought supply-side economics or Reagan’s challenge of the Soviet Union would fail.

He said Rudy Giuliani’s success as Mayor of New York is another example of unexpected conservative success, with crime falling enough that Kristol’s daughter lives in the city.

“She can’t sort of imagine it when I say, You would not have lived in New York if you had graduated from college in 1985 or 1989. You and your husband would not have thought, oh, this is such a cute, chic place to live.”

“The Reagan conservative moment really came to an end in 2006 or 2008,” Kristol said.

He said the Republican Party and President Bush both made mistakes. “Karl Rove was talking about 20 years of Republican dominance. That’s always when things fall apart and of course they did.”

The Obama administration

“And maybe we were in for a new era of progressivism, liberal dominance,” Kristol said.

He said many conservatives imagined themselves reading reading novels, writing poetry and digging bomb shelters for the next 20 years.

“I think Obama made some mistakes,” Kristol said. “If Obama were a really skillful politician in the way Franklin Roosevelt was, I’m not sure that he wouldn’t be much stronger today than he is.”

“Even though his policies were wrong and ultimately were going to run into reality.”

He said a bipartisan financial reform bill would have been a stronger political move by Obama in early 2009, instead of the partisan stimulus, Obamacare, cap and trade and card check.

Kristol said the stimulus “was a good test of Keynesiansim and it didn’t work.”

He said it didn’t produce the result its boosters expected. “Instead it produced in fact mountains of debt that we’re now going to have to work to get out from under.”

Kristol said Obama is practicing a “reactive, not terribly effective mind you, but much more conventional foreign policy.”

“He’s sort of lost the utopianism of the Cairo speech.”

Tea Party successes

“The electoral reversals in 2009 were really astonishing,” Kristol said, pointing to Virginia where Obama won by five points in 2008 and Republic Bob McDonnell won by 17 points in 2009.

“The lesson of Reagan had penetrated more deeply into the American public than people had appreciated, and probably than I had appreciated.”

Kristol said the failures of liberalism from the 1960s and 1970s and conservatism’s successes from the 1980s and 1990s are embedded in American memories.

He said there are a number of ways to defeat an incumbent and have a “very consequential election.”

Kristol said FDR’s 1932 victory could be a model for Republican’s in 2012. The candidate just needs to hold the conservative coalition together, he said, and the ideas for governing can come from think tanks and Congress.

Romney is the likely nominee, Kristol said, but he expects a “Newt Gingrich boomlet.”

“The truth is a Gingrich-Romney debate in March of 2012 would be good. I mean it would be healthy for the party,” he said.

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Raising Hale is a media project of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy. We believe that by observing government, we change it. Nathan Hale, Connecticut’s most famous Revolutionary War hero, provides the inspiration for this site. Hale believed Connecticut could have a better government – and he sacrificed his life for it. We are grateful …